The Challenger Customer

Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results

Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner, Nick Toman | 4.26 | 678 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #53 in Pitching, Ranked #73 in Customer Service

What’s the secret to executing complex sales today? As the bestseller The Challenger Sale proved, challenging the customer is the key to success. But it turns out that’s only half the story. It’s not just that you challenge but who you challenge that really matters. To win today, you need a Challenger inside the customer organization.

Picture your ideal customer: collegial, eager to meet with you, and ready to champion your products across the organization. It turns out that’s the last person you should be pitching.

The need to understand how customers make their decisions, especially when it comes to selling large-scale, business-to-business solutions, drove the author team behind The Challenger Sale to investigate how sales reps won high-quality deals. What that team discovered may turn the common wisdom about customer behavior upside down.

Based on an exhaustive study of hundreds of sales reps and thousands of customers across multiple industries and geographies, this book argues that focusing on the person with the highest title or even the person who most needs your product is something only average performers do. The team’s study found that every potential customer contact falls into one of seven distinct profiles, and while many are worth talking to, the highest performing reps concentrated their time on a specific few. Most sales reps prefer to approach customers who are open and eager to meet with them, people with clearly articulated needs that make them easy to connect to solutions. The authors call these customers Talkers. The high performers spent their time, instead, with customers who were less eager to meet with reps, generally skeptical and difficult to manage, and much more apt to be agnostic about one supplier over another. They call these customers Mobilizers.

Why? Much of the commoditization pressure suppliers face today isn’t actually the result of customers’ willingness to settle for “good enough.” It’s due instead to their failure to agree on anything more. High performers understand what their average-performing colleagues don’t: in a world in which complex deals require widespread consensus across a diverse—and typically dysfunctional—set of customer stakeholders, only Mobilizers have the skill and the will to fight for large-scale, disruptive change and, ultimately, help win the deal. Challenger sellers, in other words, target Challenger customers.

The authors unveil research that identifies Mobilizers and provide a roadmap for how sales and marketing teams can find them, engage them with disruptive insight, and leverage them to drive consensus across the customer organization.

Once you have identified the Mobilizers among your customers, almost any rep, with the right coaching, tools, and marketing support can start a chain reaction that leads to a whole organization getting on board with even the most provocative ideas.
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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Challenger Customer from the world's leading experts.

Marshall Kirkpatrick This is an amazing book. If you think analyst firms are just pay-to-play and don’t deliver big, objective value, I dare you to read this book. I’m quite confident it will change your mind. It’s challenging everything I thought about change advocacy, content marketing, and sales. https://t.co/VB8mvByK7r (Source)

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